The summer jazz festival season is upon us, and as usual, the JVC Jazz Festival New York will be the most visible. Under new management this year, the festival will feature concerts in new theaters and clubs and some curious and challenging double bills, like the pairing of Cecil Taylor and George Cables, pianists representing very different parts of the jazz spectrum. These are potentially exciting developments for a festival that has seemed stolid at times.
Charlie Haden
Kurt Rosenwinkel, who will sit in with the Bad Plus at a JVC Jazz Festival show.
Esperanza Spalding, who is on a bill with Anat Cohen.
This year’s offerings reflect changes in the festival’s organization. Last year George Wein, the founder of the festival, sold his company, Festival Productions Inc. He and some of his employees signed on with the new owner, the Festival Network LLC. He was involved in this year’s bookings but with a different staff, and there are differences.
For one, the festival’s long-running series of concerts at Hunter College’s Kaye Playhouse, featuring traditional jazz and swing and bringing in an older crowd, has ended. For another, there seems to be less emphasis on the big jamboree-homage shows: take a subject (living or dead), load up 25 musicians or so, and rotate them onto the stage along with a few unannounced surprises, to give the concertgoer a feeling of having seen something special. That’s a model that has run its course. This year’s festival seems more created for people with a longer concentration span and a greater interest in where jazz is today.
This year’s edition of JVC New York, along with the double bills, will use some new theaters and clubs, including Le Poisson Rouge, the Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture and the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. At the same time it is not unrecognizable: it still includes a few natural large-cast homages.
One, on Wednesday, is in honor of Jack Kleinsinger, the producer of Highlights in Jazz, the long-running New York jazz concert series. One, on June 23, is in honor of the pianist Dick Hyman, who was also a concert producer for 20 years (until 2004) when he ran the 92nd Street Y’s Jazz in July festival. And one, on June 21, is built around Hank Jones, the extraordinary 89-year-old pianist who, as a rhythm-section sideman and as a leader, has played and recorded with hundreds — maybe thousands — of other musicians.
Two other festivals make this a special time for jazz fans in New York. They are the Vision Festival, now in its 13th year, which runs through Sunday, and the New Languages Festival, now in its fourth year (but its first as a contender during this stretch of the calendar), which runs through Saturday.
Here is a short list of recommended concerts across the two weeks of the JVC festival, which starts on Sunday and runs through June 28. Details can be found at festivalnetwork.com or jazz.jvc.com.
TRIBUTE TO ALICE COLTRANE Alice Coltrane has often been considered a kind of sidebar to her husband. As a musician, she still isn’t widely understood. A pianist, harpist and composer, she married John Coltrane in 1965 after he had reached the mature-and-famous stage. His reputation overshadowed about two-thirds of all jazz in the 1960s, let alone the work of the woman he lived with. But of course there was more to her: she had studied informally with Bud Powell in the ’50s; in the early ’60s she was a respected part of the Detroit jazz scene; and when she moved to New York, she gigged with the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs. A trained classical musician, she became fascinated with string orchestras and choirs and made music for meditation for 30 years as the founder of a Southern California ashram. It’s not clear how much of that will be apparent in this tribute concert, but the small-group cast looks strong. Besides her son Ravi, the saxophonist, and the pianist Geri Allen, a fellow Detroiter a generation younger than her, the concert includes the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, who recorded with her in the early ’70s and then again on her last album before her death in 2007, “Translinear Light.” The Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, Manhattan, Tuesday, 8 p.m.
CHARLIE HADEN QUARTET WEST After his appearance at the Alice Coltrane concert, the bassist Charlie Haden sticks around town for a gig at Le Poisson Rouge, the “multimedia art cabaret” on the old site of the Village Gate, in the club’s very first week of operations. Quartet West is the band he formed in the mid-’80s with other Los Angeles jazz musicians, principally to explore some American music that isn’t usually the stuff of mainstream jazz quartets. Mr. Haden is a film buff, and old Hollywood soundtracks are where he gets a lot of his source material. It’s relaxed, deluxe and extremely nostalgic music, and his melancholy pull on the instrument, as if he doesn’t want to play any notes that might sound automatic, causes some creative friction against the more headlong styles of his band mates. Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, Wednesday, 7 and 9:30 p.m.
CECIL TAYLOR/GEORGE CABLES Twenty years ago, a double bill like this — dissonant experimentalist, sweet-sounding traditionalist — would have been a total provocation. Now it’s just responsible telling of history. These pianists were two of the best musicians in jazz during the 1970s and ’80s, but in very different subgroupings: Mr. Taylor establishing his kaleidoscopic, improvised solo-piano vocabulary (on records like “Indent” and “Silent Tongues”) and Mr. Cables establishing the sound of the hard mainstream accompanying Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper, and in his own bands. I take it on faith that there’s an audience that can embrace them both, but I want to see it with my own eyes. The Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, June 20, 8 p.m.
HERBIE HANCOCK Herbie Hancock’s influence in jazz has been so pervasive among jazz pianists — and mainstream jazz in general — for so long that it’s easy to take him for granted. It’s still worth seeing his concerts, though. Not because they’re always well conceived; sometimes they aim themselves virtuosically at so many tastes that they become grandiose. But he regularly gives proof that he is still an extremely special musician. This year his reputation has been pushed higher still by an entirely unexpected record-of-the-year Grammy Award for “River: The Joni Letters,” an album of Joni Mitchell’s music, and presumably he will be performing some of it on a tour called “River of Possibilities,” with some of the musicians from the album (no Wayne Shorter this time) plus the singer Sonya Kitchell. Carnegie Hall, June 23, 8 p.m.
THE BAD PLUS WITH KURT ROSENWINKEL The Bad Plus is not a jam band and just about never extends casual invitations for other musicians to sit in. The individual styles of its three players are very particular and some of its compositional ideas odd and delicate (or just odd). It’s a band that is fun to hear, but the fun is hard-edged and cerebral, based heavily in practiced arrangements. I’ll be fascinated to see what happens when these players open up their music enough to admit as a fourth member one of their peers: Kurt Rosenwinkel, the revered jazz guitarist of the late-’90s generation in New York jazz. The Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, June 24, 8 p.m.
ANAT COHEN/ESPERANZA SPALDING A two-woman double bill seems at this point a pretty square way to deal with the issue that there are two good new bandleaders in town. Yet this could be an excellent show. Ms. Cohen, who plays clarinet and saxophone, and Ms. Spalding, who plays bass, are both strong and buoyant melodic improvisers. For both, music is song above all else. Another thing they have in common is that they see jazz as part of a pretty large picture. In Ms. Cohen’s case the picture includes early-20th-century classical music, Brazilian choro and samba, as well as folk and traditional music of the Middle East. In Ms. Spalding’s case it includes funk and pop (she’s a singer, too) and Brazilian and Afro-Cuban rhythms. They are members of the new breed, and particularly charismatic examples of how jazz expands according to patterns of social history and education. The Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, June 25, 8 p.m.
SOULIVE WITH JOSHUA REDMAN Though this show wouldn’t seem to be exactly earth-shaking — a grooving, Meters-influenced guitar-organ-drums group with a big college audience that trades recordings of the performances online — it does represent one of the innovations promised by the revamped JVC festival. That’s because its producers have pushed Soulive into something both casual and slightly special: jamming with Mr. Redman, a saxophonist who can rip in a context like this, for a whole evening as opposed to a one- or two-song cameo, in the old jazz festival style. Le Poisson Rouge, June 26, 7:30 p.m.
AL GREEN/DIANNE REEVES Both of these great singers are alive to the response of a crowd: they practice performance as a constant energy loop, from stage to seats and back to stage. Ms. Reeves has a big, trained, authoritative voice, with precise intonation as she forms individual notes in long strings of them. She’s generous with her talent. And Mr. Green, whose latest album, “Lay It Down,” works like an effective tribute to his sound in 1973, continues to be a performing marvel, if slightly more mysterious. It’s as if he is inside and outside the music at the same time, singing a line beautifully and then commenting on it, laughing about it or injecting a joyous non sequitur. He seems like a guy who enjoys his own show. Carnegie Hall, June 27, 8 p.m.
RICHARD GALLIANO In Europe, particularly in France, his homeland, theaccordionist Richard Galliano is respected as a great improviser, but in the United States word has spread about him more slowly. Surely that is because his music carries natural echoes of bal musette and tango, which have much less resonance in the United States. It can’t just be American cultural myopia, mighty though that is. Anyway, Mr. Galliano is something to hear, a virtuoso with wisdom and taste. His Tangaria Quartet explores tango, but also jazz, baroque and Venezuelan music. Zankel Hall, June 28, 8:30 p.m.
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